‘Duck Dynasty’ lures a growing audience

Monday

Oct 8, 2012 at 11:49 AM

Neil GenzlingerNew York Times News Service

WEST MONROE — The moments before a religious service begins are generally ones of quiet reflection for the congregants, but on a recent Sunday at White’s Ferry Road Church of Christ here something incongruous was going on two-thirds of the way back in the spacious hall.Parishioners were walking up to perhaps the scruffiest, most disheveled-looking man in the church as he sat in his pew, offering a greeting and making a request. They were asking him to autograph copies of his biography.The man was Phil Robertson, who along with his heavily bearded sons is famous in this part of Louisiana and, increasingly, all over the country. The Robertson family’s duck-call-making business, Duck Commander, has been an evolving media phenomenon, beginning years ago with videos aimed at hunters, then becoming the subject of a show on the Outdoor Channel and last March moving up to the much bigger stage of A&E.That A&E series, “Duck Dynasty,” begins its second season Wednesday night, now firmly established as one of the quirkiest, most enjoyable reality shows on television. The Robertson clan — Phil and his wife, Kay; their sons; the sons’ wives; weird Uncle Si; even the grandchildren — all seem to have a natural gift for deadpan humor.They are busting the image of what might collectively be called backwoods TV, the ever-growing list of reality shows about wrangling alligators and catfish and wild hogs. Where most of those shows are one-note and aggressively low brow, “Duck Dynasty” has a varied cast of characters who fit together seamlessly, and any idiocy is deliberate. Sure, making an impromptu duck pond in the warehouse loading dock, as some of the guys did in a Season 1 episode, might not have been the most productive use of time, but it was pretty funny. And the show always leaves you unclear whether the whole extended family is just pulling your leg.“Duck Dynasty” is loosely centered on the Duck Commander business, which is headed by Willie Robertson, 39, the third of Phil and Kay’s four sons. Very little duck-call-making actually takes place in any given episode. Instead the focus is likely to be some harebrained project instigated by Willie’s older brother, Jase, or Phil’s obsession with ridding his land of beavers, or Kay’s determination to open a restaurant, or Uncle Si’s efforts to give driving pointers to a young member of the clan, or some similar bit of frivolousness. Willie, the only man with any business sense, is forever exasperated by his inability to get Jase and the rest of the Duck Commander staff to stop goofing off, although he too has been known to shirk certain duties — for instance, blowing off a career-day appearance at his daughter’s school to accept a $100-a-hole golf challenge from Jase.The show has gotten better as it has found its natural voice, which in large part has meant letting the Robertsons be themselves. David McKillop, A&E’s executive vice president for programming, said the first step was realizing that the clan deserved more than a simple hunting show, which is how the series was originally pitched.“When we looked deeper into the story, what we found here was a very unusual family,” McKillop said. “Why waste it as a hunting show when in reality this was a great family show?” Then came a process of learning to just turn on the cameras and let the Robertsons go.“When we first met with the production company,” recalled Korie, Willie’s wife, “they had an intern give us kind of a script they had written that was going to look like our show, and it was just so not us. It was like, the wives get up and go chase the varmints; it was just total redneck. That is not us. That’s not the way we live.” That’s not the way they live because everyone in this family is smart and equipped with a keen sense of how to mine a sort of self-deprecating wisdom from the redneck caricature. So now, the producers might suggest ideas or setups to get things moving, but what happens next comes largely out of the Robertsons’ heads.“I think Willie coined it: guided reality,” Jase said. “But all the stuff we say is — I don’t know if I can speak for everybody, but all the stuff I say, I just say what I normally say.” To spend a Sunday afternoon with the extended family in Phil and Kay’s kitchen is to realize that, yes, what you see on television is what you get in real life. Phil really does sprinkle his conversation with the catchphrase “happy, happy, happy.” Si, Phil’s brother, really does have a penchant for saying the unexpected and outlandish. Willie and Jase really do trade barbs almost nonstop. The wives really do look considerably better and often sound considerably savvier than their husbands.And in the extended family’s presence the question of how much of the show depicts the Robertsons’ actual lives and how much is a plausible variation thereof starts to seem irrelevant. Does the real-life Si possess the hidden sewing skills that enabled the reality-show Si to come to the rescue when, in a Season 1 episode, the women were having trouble making an apron for full-figured women? Who knows, but you can now find the apron on the Duck Commander website, priced at $75. “Out of stock,” the listing currently says. “Duck Dynasty” episodes generally have a sitcom structure, bouncing between two story lines, and the result can be more wryly amusing than many scripted comedies. Viewers seem to be responding. The Season 1 finale in May was the highest-rated nonsports program on cable that night, with 2.6 million viewers, a record for the series. The growing popularity is affecting everything about the Robertsons’ lives.“They told us, ‘Look, y’all ain’t going to believe the business this is going to create,’ ” Phil Robertson said while giving an all-terrain-vehicle tour of the duck blinds on his extensive acreage. “We said, ‘Yeah, right.’ ” But now, he said, there’s a race “to dream up stuff to hang, stick on your wall, put on your desk,” to keep up with demand.At the dinner table, Jase held out his hands.“See the scars?” he said, the price of hand-making Duck Commander’s signature product. “That’s a lot of duck calls.” The number of orders caught the family off guard because it was June, months away from hunting season.“Usually,” Jase said, “this time of year people aren’t ordering duck calls.” One of the ministers at the White’s Ferry Road Church that morning had been Phil and Kay’s oldest son, Alan, whom the family regards as a sort of reverse black sheep: He’s the only one without a beard. He had recently told the congregation that he was stepping away from the ministry: Willie had asked him to help run Duck Commander because once filming for the show begins, everyone else is occupied with the business of making a TV show. There has been a change, too, in what happens when the Robertsons are out in public. All the bearded men — the youngest son, Jep, also turns up on the show — have stories about what Jase calls facial profiling: instances in which a security guard tried to have them removed from an event where they were the featured guests, or when someone mistook them for vagrants and offered them meal money, or whatever.Lately, though, those encounters are being replaced by ones in which they’re recognized by fans who get a little too friendly.“ ‘Can I touch your beard?’ ” Willie said, imitating a common refrain. “I get that all the time.”

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